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Boiled Spinach

A simple boiled spinach dish seasoned with salt, baking soda, and butter or dripping.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 5 ingredients
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Why it works: Spinach and butter are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 24% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 2,583 recipes. Both carry trans-2-decenal, which smells waxy, orange. The science ↓

Boiled Spinach

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Wash the spinach carefully in several waters.

  2. In a saucepan, combine 2 tablespoons of water, 1 teaspoon of salt, and a small piece of baking soda.

Cook

  1. Bring the mixture to a boil, then add the spinach.

  2. Boil the spinach for about 15 minutes.

Finish and serve

  1. Press all the water from the spinach, then add a little butter or dripping before serving.

Recipe from a historical cookbook (Internet Archive).

Transcribed from a scanned cookbook and modernised for today's kitchens. Where the book gave no heat or time, or said "a moderate oven", the temperatures and times here may be modern equivalents rather than the book's own figures.

Explore the science

The flavor team

The pairs that carry this dish. Each one is judged two ways: how much their aromas overlap, and how often cooks already put them together.

  1. Spinach + buttertop 24% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together2,583 recipes

    Shared aroma: trans-2-decenal (waxy, orange).

Ranks compare each pair with 20,000 random ingredient pairs on CompKitchen. How we score pairs

What each ingredient does

Fresh garden spinach
Forms the main body of the dish; its leaves soften into a tender, moist mass when boiled.
Butter or dripping
Adds fat and richness, carrying flavour and giving the cooked greens a smooth mouthfeel.
Baking soda
Raises the cooking water's alkalinity, which helps the leaves turn a brighter green while boiling.

The step that matters

Pressing out the water. Spinach holds a lot of water, and any left in the leaves dilutes the butter or dripping and makes the dish watery and bland. Pressing it out well keeps the texture concentrated and the flavour full.

“What each ingredient does” and “The step that matters” were written by Claude from this recipe’s own method and reviewed in samples by CompKitchen.

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